Despite their different experiences and choices, both women find themselves in very similar situations: beaten down and alone. Both have found that they are unprepared for the hardships that chance thrust upon them, and, by the end of their stories, we see that both women are overcome by their sorrows and ignorant of how to improve their situation. The reader sees also that they are both terribly disappointed and alone. Florence is alone in a literal sense. Unmarried and childless, she lives alone in a small apartment, and there is no mention of any friends. Elizabeth finds herself alone also despite the fact that she is surrounded by family. Gabriel is not someone in whom she can confide. He is physically and verbally abusive, someone more to be feared than loved. While she does care for her children, it is impossible to have a real friendship with one’s very young child especially when the child is being brought up in a lie. It is also painfully obvious that none of the women in her church really know or understand her.
Furthermore, Elizabeth’s friendship with Florence has been thwarted since Elizabeth’s marriage to Gabriel because he acts as a barrier between the two women. There is a mutual trust, understanding, and respect between Florence and Elizabeth, but this is not allowed to grow because of the disrespect and distrust between Florence and Gabriel. Florence and Gabriel both hold the conviction that the other had led an unholy life, and Gabriel is not anxious for Florence to spend time with his wife (whom he also believes has also led an unholy life) or to be around his children whom he believes Florence will contaminate.
Florence and Elizabeth are character foils, enabling the reader to see how different experiences can lead two people in similar circumstances to perceive and react to their similar situations in different ways. They also serve to illustrate that those same people often find themselves in very similar positions despite different backgrounds. Elizabeth changed drastically (and for the worse) between the time when she was living with her parents and when the reader encounters her in her marriage with Gabriel.
The reader is made aware of these changes in Elizabeth by the narrator’s descriptions of her, and her son, John’s, observations of her. In her father’s presence, for example, Elizabeth “pranced and postured like a very queen: and she was not afraid of anything,” but John sees his mother with “dark hard lines running downward from her eyes, and the deep perpetual scowl in her forehead, and the down turned tightened mouth.” He had seen a photograph of her once where she looked young and proud as if she knew no evil and was able to laugh. But the Elizabeth John knows never laughs, and he wonders how his mother had come to change so dramatically. John knows little about his mother and her hardships in her life and, therefore, cannot understand how such a change could have occurred.
The reader, on the other hand, is allowed into the entirety of Elizabeth’s life and understands the events that have so changed her. It is through three separate, tragic events that Elizabeth changes. These events are significant not only in their own rite but also because they serve to illustrate how Elizabeth’s separation from her father was an ongoing process, not just an immediate change in location, but a mental detachment and, finally, an ideological break as well.
The first blow to Elizabeth was her separation from her father—a relationship of love—and the consequent exile to the home of her aunt where her aunt, citing Elizabeth’s pride as the causal factor, constantly prophesied Elizabeth’s fall from grace. Living in her aunt’s home was not just distasteful to Elizabeth, it was abhorrent. The reader knows almost nothing else of her time spent there. The aunt remains nameless, referred to only as “her aunt” or “she.” During this first and most obvious separation from her father, which Elizabeth was forced to endure and in which she was physically removed from her father’s side by her dead mother’s sister and taken to live a great distance away, reunions with her father were few, and Elizabeth waited for him to come and take her away from her aunt as he had promised, but that long-awaited event never occurred.
The second event that jarred Elizabeth into a new world was the suicide of Richard because it was after his death that she was forced to become an adult: “Elizabeth, overnight, had become an old woman. … ” Alone and pregnant, the young Elizabeth moved out of the home where she had been a border and found a squalid apartment of her own. This was the first time that she had lived away from family. First she was with her parents; then she was removed to her aunt’s home; and then she was in the home of her aunt’s relative. The diminishing consanguinity is indicative of the mental development into adulthood.
After Richard’s death, Elizabeth found herself very lonely. She stopped associating with his friends because it was obvious that they had nothing in common and also because she didn’t want them to know of Richard’s child. She did not confide in her aunt; she was ashamed of her condition and could not go to her father for help because “she could not think of how to tell him, how to bring such pain to him who had had such pain already.” Here the reader can see Elizabeth’s quandary and mental separation from her father. That she was unable to think of a way to reach out to someone with whom she shared such a deep love shows that Elizabeth no longer knew her father and probably feared that he no longer knew her either.
After John’s birth, Elizabeth saw almost no one and shunned the company of her coworkers. It was only Florence who was able to break Elizabeth’s shell and befriend her. Perhaps, if she had had a greater network of friends or the help of her family, Elizabeth’s life would have been much different. The loss of Richard separated Elizabeth from any support that could have given her strength. This tragedy set the stage for the next calamity in her life: her marriage to Gabriel.
When Elizabeth met Gabriel, she believed it to be a blessing for her; it turned out to be a bane. Elizabeth ignored her own fears when she first met Gabriel, the brother of her only friend, and entered into a relationship with him. She also ignored Florence’s council against the union because Florence cited instances of his evildoings. Elizabeth relied on Gabriel for her strength, giving up her own self-sufficiency. Only after her marriage did Elizabeth discover the Gabriel that his sister hated. During their marriage, Elizabeth allowed herself and her children to be beaten by Gabriel, which is in direct opposition to her father’s advice. Her father told her long ago, “if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never let oneself be beaten.” She endures her husband’s rage because she has exchanged the pride that had carried her through her past trials for his empty promise of love. She is unable to stand up against her husband’s brutality just as she is unable to leave him. That she has ignored her father’s good advice proves that she has lost her final tie with him. She abandoned his ideology.
